Unity3D is a powerful suite of tools (Project IDE, Code IDE, run-time) for game development.

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The Unity IDE offers an Asset Store. If you haven’t yet familiarized yourself with the Asset Store, this is a great opportunity to dive in.  You’ll find nearly everything a game developer could wish for– complete template projects, models of every shape and size, countless textures and materials, an extensive set of code libraries, hours of professional music and sound effects, and a broad selection of editor extensions to bring new functionality to Unity.  Best of all, we’ve gone out of our way to make sure that these offerings are both affordable and covered by a common, easy-to-use license without legal complexities such as royalties.

I think of the store like a free bag of temporary art while I work. More rarely, when tackling a technical challenge I check the store to see if another developer has solved my needs and created a code library. The naming doesn’t seem standardized, but when I say 3rd party code-library, package, or plugin I mean the same thing. I mean a collection of coding classes which augment the IDE itself and/or enable richer development.

Something remarkable, and quite different than the Flash community, is that these packages can actually add functionality to the Unity3D IDE itself. New first-class menus, panels, UI Gizmos, etc… It is truly amazing.

I have asked leading developers and combed hundreds of message boards and forums looking for what the community thinks are the most Essential Unity3D Plugins / Packages. Here is my short list. All are compatible with both free and pro versions of Unity 4.x. Apparently some packages are pro-only. Also I believe all can target any platform which Unity targets (desktop, web, mobile, etc…).

2DToolkit

iTween is a simple, powerful and easy to use animation system for Unity. Focusing on the established solutions and frameworks of projects such as TweenLite, Tweener, and other Flash-based tweening and interpolation systems, iTween is a battle-tested solution for streamlining production in the Unity environment. If it needs to come alive; its shouldn’t be frustrating. iTween exists to help you reach your goals without making the journey difficult, allowing polish to coexist in tandem with production.

I have used this on some proof of concepts and love it. The tile map system does not appear complete with a good demo included (as of 2.0), so I’m eagerly awaiting that.

Price: $65

Link: Developer / AssetStore

Alternatives: Ex2D (35$), Orthello2D (Free), Sprite Manager 2 ($45) & Uni2D ($45), & Many more…

Community Buzz: Look, 2D in Unity is both possible and super powerful. Its also a super popular (more than 3D?) type of game these days. So there are many, many packages to help this. I chose 2DToolkit for my work after researching what was out there. I wanted the most powerful, friendly, ACTIVE project.

Features:

• NEW! The tilemap and UI add-ons are FREE and included with 2D Toolkit!
• NEW! Platform specific sprite collections.
• Automatic atlasing system.
• Pixel perfect rendering.
• Workflow-centric animation editor – Set up large animations in seconds.
• Sliced sprites for 9-slice scaling.
• Automatically generate multiple atlases from Sprite Collections.
• Create automatic and custom colliders.
• Create polygon colliders with multiple shapes for one sprite.
• Static sprite batcher with automatic collider generation.
• Texture gradient support for TextMeshes
• Extremely efficient and lean C# runtime code.

iTween

iTween is a simple, powerful and easy to use animation system for Unity. Focusing on the established solutions and frameworks of projects such as TweenLite, Tweener, and other Flash-based tweening and interpolation systems, iTween is a battle-tested solution for streamlining production in the Unity environment. If it needs to come alive; its shouldn’t be frustrating. iTween exists to help you reach your goals without making the journey difficult, allowing polish to coexist in tandem with production.

I used this on several projects. I feel like it doesn’t do ‘much’, but it does it great. Perhaps coming from Flash with Greensocks Tween classes I was spoiled. Also, the syntax of this could be greatly improved. The author recently posted that a new version is (slowly) in the works. Still, its great.

Price: Free!

Link: Developer / AssetStore

Alternatives: None

Community Buzz: This seems to be a staple tool of every great Unity developer.

Features:

• Easily fade audio
• Move the camera
• Fade, Move, Scale, & Rotate your GameObjects
• Update your Vectors!
• Compatible with PlayMaker (see below)
• To be most useful I recommend the “iTween Parameter Code Hinting” free add-on.

NGUI

This is the ‘Next Generation UI Kit’ or simply NGUI. Unity provides built-in functionality for creating graphical user interfaces (GUI) including buttons and text. However the system before Unity 4.0 was pretty poor and the current system leaves much to be desired. GUI allows the user to create.

I have not used this in production yet. Will probably be my next package to purchase and explore.

Price: $95 USD

Link: Developer / AssetStore

Alternatives: EZGUI ($200), iGUI ($95). Great comparison article here.

Community Buzz: There are some compelling alternatives, but also we see a lot of the community using it, blogging about it, and making tutorial videos. There are packages which add functionality to NGUI too (from NGUI developer and others), so there is good momentum on this and it is in active development. This is one of the most often mentioned packages in “Unity3D Developer” job posts. Its a popular skill to have!

Features:

• Full Inspector integration (Custom Editors)
• What you see in the Scene view is what you get in the Game view (fully WYSIWYG)
• Automatic atlasing system.
• Pixel perfect rendering.
• Component-based, modular nature: attach the behaviors you want to make your widgets do what you want without having to code.
• Flexible event system
• Make complex UIs that take only 1 draw call
• UI Components included: Label, Sprite, Sliced Sprite, Tiled Sprite, Filled Sprite, Simple Button, Image Button, Radio Button, Checkbox, Progress Bar, Slider, Input, Dropdown List, Scrollable List

What’s next?

I am working on an HD Video tutorial series which will include some of these plugins. Your feedback will help me know which I should cover first. Let me know!

What are your thoughts?

Do you prefer an alternative to the suggestions above? Or do you have an additional recommendation? Please comment below.